3 ms·

Playing j2me games on a phone in some ways felt better than modern smartphone gaming. This is surely nostalgia and I wouldn’t want to go back to these times, i

by thih9 4y ago

Playing j2me games on a phone in some ways felt better than modern smartphone gaming. This is surely nostalgia and I wouldn’t want to go back to these times, if only because of tiny screens. But I will still miss that era, tactile feedback from actual keys, single player gameplay, way less ads or dark patterns, etc.

baisq 4y ago
You paid for the game upfront and that was that.
badsectoracula 4y ago
Doom RPG was the first game i ever finished on a phone. While from a technical perspective modern smartphones have way more power and they are way more consistent than J2ME phones ever hoped to be[0] the fact that there were physical controls made the old phones -IMO- better for many types of games, like platformers, exploration, first person games, etc. Though on the other hand pretty much all phones had some very slow LCD screens that with fast motion they became all smudgy. Having said that turn-based games like Doom RPG work fine on smartphones. There are some types of games, including dungeon crawlers and "point and click" adventure games (or point and tap i guess :-P) that i expected to flourish in touchscreen devices like mobile phones and tablets, but that didn't end up happening. [0] i was into gamedev J2ME games at the time, working on a couple of projects, eventually abandoned the effort because i was getting bug reports that were impossible for me to debug since instead of Sun having a single VM that everyone would targeted, many manufacturers made their own or used some 3rd party ones - and this ended up having tons of inconsistencies and bugs (i remember even things like devices reporting their screen resolution wrong - how can you get that wrong?). I knew someone who worked at a company testing these J2ME games and he said they had a warehouse full of phones and basically went on to test the games on each one of them - but this was not something i could do myself, so i gave up.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > There are some types of games, including dungeon crawlers and "point and click" adventure games (or point and tap i guess :-P) that i expected to flourish in touchscreen devices like mobile phones and tablets, but that didn't end up happening. ScummVM is available for touchscreen phones. Pointing directly on the screen doesn't work well, but there should be a mode where you can swipe around to position the cursor and then tap anywhere to send a click at the cursor's location.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Well, "point and tap" was mostly a joke :-) i'd expect the game to have slightly different approach - most likely something similar to the Sierra's SCI games where you'd choose the action to do from a bar. Point-and-click adventure games is even something that people started using in recent years, for more than 3 decades these were just "adventure games" and over their history used a lot of types of interfaces. In any case those were games whose UX (at least those using 2D graphics anyway) is basically about moving and activating objects in space, something that works very well on a touch screen (if anything it can be even more intuitive), which is why i expect them to flourish there. Also note that what i refer to is them being popular types of games to see on such devices, not just them existing.
Joker_vD 4y ago
Not necessarily even single-player, I remember having fun playing some Worms clone with two other friends over Bluetooth back in the high school. One of them had an actual Motorola RAZR V3, no kidding.
Pxtl 4y ago
The real flaw was the aggressively awful dpads phones had. If they'd made the minimal effort to have decent quality inputs then games of that era could've been fine even with the one-thumb limitation.

by thih9 4y ago

baisq 4y ago

You paid for the game upfront and that was that.

badsectoracula 4y ago

Doom RPG was the first game i ever finished on a phone. While from a technical perspective modern smartphones have way more power and they are way more consistent than J2ME phones ever hoped to be[0] the fact that there were physical controls made the old phones -IMO- better for many types of games, like platformers, exploration, first person games, etc. Though on the other hand pretty much all phones had some very slow LCD screens that with fast motion they became all smudgy. Having said that turn-based games like Doom RPG work fine on smartphones. There are some types of games, including dungeon crawlers and "point and click" adventure games (or point and tap i guess :-P) that i expected to flourish in touchscreen devices like mobile phones and tablets, but that didn't end up happening. [0] i was into gamedev J2ME games at the time, working on a couple of projects, eventually abandoned the effort because i was getting bug reports that were impossible for me to debug since instead of Sun having a single VM that everyone would targeted, many manufacturers made their own or used some 3rd party ones - and this ended up having tons of inconsistencies and bugs (i remember even things like devices reporting their screen resolution wrong - how can you get that wrong?). I knew someone who worked at a company testing these J2ME games and he said they had a warehouse full of phones and basically went on to test the games on each one of them - but this was not something i could do myself, so i gave up.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> There are some types of games, including dungeon crawlers and "point and click" adventure games (or point and tap i guess :-P) that i expected to flourish in touchscreen devices like mobile phones and tablets, but that didn't end up happening. ScummVM is available for touchscreen phones. Pointing directly on the screen doesn't work well, but there should be a mode where you can swipe around to position the cursor and then tap anywhere to send a click at the cursor's location.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  Well, "point and tap" was mostly a joke :-) i'd expect the game to have slightly different approach - most likely something similar to the Sierra's SCI games where you'd choose the action to do from a bar. Point-and-click adventure games is even something that people started using in recent years, for more than 3 decades these were just "adventure games" and over their history used a lot of types of interfaces. In any case those were games whose UX (at least those using 2D graphics anyway) is basically about moving and activating objects in space, something that works very well on a touch screen (if anything it can be even more intuitive), which is why i expect them to flourish there. Also note that what i refer to is them being popular types of games to see on such devices, not just them existing.

Joker_vD 4y ago

Not necessarily even single-player, I remember having fun playing some Worms clone with two other friends over Bluetooth back in the high school. One of them had an actual Motorola RAZR V3, no kidding.

Pxtl 4y ago

The real flaw was the aggressively awful dpads phones had. If they'd made the minimal effort to have decent quality inputs then games of that era could've been fine even with the one-thumb limitation.